Telecoms, internet in Pakistan

Cellular companies join hands against WLL operators

KARACHI: Major cellular companies have joined hands against wireless local loop (WLL) operators and approached the telecom regulator to penalise one of the companies, just days after the authorities’ findings that most of the service providers are not following the determination on limited mobility.

Telecom sources said Paktel, Telenor, Warid and Mobilink had signed and sent a formal complaint letter to the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority pointing out the violations of regulated policies by the WLL operators.

“The complaint, in fact, defines overall violation by the WLL operators for effectively providing cellular services, which amounts to clear violation of the determination on implementation of limited mobility issued by the PTA,” said a source citing the complaint text.

“Mobile phone operators have raised their concerns recently and expressed doubts on the intentions of the WLL operators, who opted for limited mobility.”

He said the cellular service providers were of the view such violations by the WLL operators could lead to serious damages to the companies investing billions of dollars in infrastructure development.

“The cellular companies are the only parties licensed to provide mobile telecom services in the whole of Pakistan, and have collectively invested billions of dollars in this behalf,” he said.

Fresh complaint lodged by the cellular companies has come up as second serious signals of violations in less than a month, as the PTA couple of weeks ago raised the same concerns in its quality survey report conducted for the WLL operators across the country.

“It was also observed in the survey that WLL operators are not strictly following the determination on limited mobility,” the PTA said in a statement issued after the survey report.

“Therefore, they have been asked to take immediate action to implement the same and submit a compliance report to PTA by 15 December 2006,” said the watchdog. The cellular companies’ complaint appears to match the regulators’ findings.

“The cellular companies argue that WLL licenses are fixed line telecom licenses in which the service provider has to identify a subscriber with respect to a fixed address (either home or an office) allowing the subscriber to move about within a cell,” said the source.

“Therefore, mobility beyond a single cell will lead them into the domain of cellular mobile operations.”

In this regard, he said, the PTA carried out a detailed consultation with all the stakeholders and in July 2005 issued a determination that restricted the mobility in WLL system to a single Home-Cell.”

The government deregulated the telecom sector in 2003 in a move believed to enhance teledensity and to promote basic telephony mainly the in the rural parts of the country. The Telecom Policy 2003 prepared in line with this objective applied to opening up of the fixed line telecom facility.

The policy also known as fixed-line policy proposes two types of licenses, which includes local loop fixed-line and long distance and international (LDI) fixed-line. But since the start of WLL operations, they have been facing strong opposition from the cellular companies.

“It is important to keep in mind that the aim of the WLL was not to provide mobility to the customers, rather it was to provide fixed wireless access (FWA), which is an alternative to fixed line or Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS),” he said.

“If the mobility factor was more important for the Pakistani consumer, the government could have issued many more cellular mobile licenses to meet the market demand. But it was estimated that for a market like Pakistan, six cellular operators will be more than enough to achieve an adequately competitive environment.”

The government charged over Rs10 million for each license of WLL operations and it awarded some 84 licenses to 36 companies for fixed line local loop; fifteen companies have been given 90 licenses for WLL while 12 licenses were issued licenses for LDI.

The government however set $291 million as a GSM license fee and the six companies claim to have spent $3 billion collectively so far to build an infrastructure. By the end of November 2006 the six cellular companies enjoyed more than 46 million subscribers across the country compared to 1.42 million customers of WLL operators.

Email from PTCL NOC
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From: NOC ISB
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2006 6:25 PM
Subject: Clarification

Dear Valued Customers
Because of the earthquake in Taiwan on 27-12-2006 (cuttings from news
sources attached) couple of our eastern side links (STIX and TeleGlobe) were
sevearly affected due to which you might have suffered degraded services
between 10am to 1pm on 27-12-2006. The problem is temporarily handeled, but
the links are not fully restored yet. The exact restoration period of these
links is not known yet and will be conveyed to you after intimation from our
upstream providers.
We highly regret the inconvenience caused to you during this period.
NOC can be contacted 24 hours and 7 days a week for Technical Assistance.

Kamran Bhatti

ADE ITI,
Network Operation Center
Pakistan Internet Exchange (PIE)
Rawalpindi, Pakistan

December 27, 2006

Earthquake Cuts Asian Telephone and Internet Services

By Randy Chen

(AXcess News) Hong Kong - A major earthquake in Indonesia disrupted telephone and Internet services in Southeast Asian countries Wednesday after an underseas cable off the coast of Taiwan was damaged by the 7.1 quake.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Taiwan’s largest operator, managed to reroute connections, restoring partial service to the US, Canada and China. But it could still be weeks before repairs can be made to the undersea cable damaged by the earthquake.

Operators are using back-up systems to help alleviate the bottleneck as parts of Hong Kong, China, Singapore and India remain without Internet and telephone services.

Online banking services in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China remain down with HSBC completely offline.

Singapore Telecom, France Telecom SA and Pakistan Telecommunication Co. are in a group that own the Sea-Me-We3 cables linking Europe to Asia that were damaged by the quake.

Part of Asia Netcom Corp.’s EAC fiber optic cable was also damaged.

According to Internet Traffic Report, a Website that monitors the flow of global Internet traffic, the average response time in miliseconds in Asia is now 405 and packet loss has reached 30 per cent.

The earthquake struck at 8:26 p.m. local time on Dec. 26, 10 kilometers (6 miles) under the seabed, the U.S. Geological Survey said on its Web site and Internet as well as telephone services have been down ever since.

The repairs will be outsourced, using ships designed to pick up cable from the sea bed and repair it. Some repairs could take up to a month to complete.

Cellphone subscribers cross 46mn

Published: Sunday, 24 December, 2006, 08:59 AM Doha Time

KARACHI: The number of cellular phone subscribers in Pakistan has crossed the 46mn mark and officials as well as operators see it touching 50mn within next couple of months for the first time ever on continued popularity of the service across the country.
The latest figures compiled by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) suggest cellular phone connections stood at 46.45m by November, which had crossed 41mn by the end of the first quarter of 2006-07.
“By November 30, total number of cellular subscribers stood at 46.45mn,” said a PTA official. “It reflects almost a 12% growth in total cellular subscriber base from October 1 to November 30.”
The official said during first five months, more than 12mn new connections were sold out on the back of comparatively cheaper tariff offers due to rising competition among the cellular service providers.
“So there was over 27% mobile density rate by November,” said the PTA official. “Almost all the four major companies Mobilink, Ufone, Warid and Telenor grabbed better market share during the first five months of 2006-07, which also brought different tariff packages for the subscribers.”
The figures gathered by the telecom watchdog, shows by November 2006 Mobilink led the market share with 22.03mn subscribers followed by Ufone, which was serving to 9.6mn people across the country.
With the arrival of UAE-based Warid Telecom and Norwegian Telenor both competition and subscriber base grew at much faster pace, as the last year’s entrants attracted 7.3mn and 5.8mn subscribers respectively by the end of November 2006.
The PTA data say by November Paktel services enjoyed 1.4mn subscribers and the only AMPS service Instaphone had a share of 0.25mn by November. – Internews

© Gulf Times Newspaper, 2006

Broadband Faces Obstacles in Pakistan

High rates, poor infrastructure primary culprits

Muhammad Jamil Bhatti
Published 2006-12-20 16:22 (KST)

Internet usage has tremendously increased throughout Pakistan during the last couple of years, with users reaching a record number of 12 million. Not only young adults but children, the elderly, and even blind people are using it.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which were giving attention only to Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, have now extended their services to other cities of the country. Internet service is currently being provided to more than 2,389 cities and towns in Pakistan.

According to the report of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), the prices of personal computers (PCs) have been decreasing, and thus more people have PCs at their residences or workplaces. Therefore, people are now able to connect to the Internet at their residences or workplaces using cheaply available Internet cards. Internet cards are available in the market for as low as 2.5 rupees (US$0.04) per hour. But the Internet speed is creating more headaches and problems for the users. The usage of Internet cards has also affected the growth of net cafes.

On the other hand, broadband services growth is also slow due to high tariffs, lack of awareness among consumers, and paucity of service providers. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) undertook a major initiative to facilitate the development of broadband services, by permitting all ISPs to offer broadband. The government announced a Broadband Policy to support the availability of affordable and high-speed Internet. The government also encouraged private sector investment in these services. With this policy, the government was looking at a target of 500,000 broadband users within five years. But, in spite of all efforts and policies, broadband penetration growth in the country was slow. There are only 56,611 broadband subscribers (DSL), in the country, with the largest share going to 13 major ISPs.

DSL services are available in selected areas of the major cities and provincial headquarters of the country. Worldcall is considered the only main cable operator providing broadband services in Pakistan. Some other cable operators also provide broadband services to consumers. For the last few months, they have been campaigning to raise consumer awareness. Some corporate customers in Pakistan, which cannot gain other modes, are using satellite broadband services, which have very high tariffs.

PTA has been in touch continuously with the industry to ensure the enforcement of all regulatory measures to enable broadband proliferation. There are some major problems obstructing broadband services growth in the country.

Firstly, the quality of copper in Pakistan is not good and some copper cables are in very bad shape. Faulty distribution poles and cabinets, and difficulties in sharing Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) resources like cables and ducts are also a big hindrance.

Secondly, there are some issues regarding PTCL’s local loop unbundling, transmission media, collocations, and Optic Fiber Access Network (OFAN) from PTCL.

Thirdly, the line rent on DSL connections charged by PTCL is considered overly burdensome.

Fourthly, the consumers are not well aware of the benefits of broadband services in terms of avoiding telephone charges, time saving, and convenience.

Fifthly and most significantly, the PTCL monopoly is playing vital roll. PTCL’s prices are very high and constitute the major share of the total cost to service providers.

Lastly, broadband service tariffs in Pakistan are many times higher compared to those in some other countries and not affordable for common people.

Lack of usable infrastructure and high broadband tariffs are being considered as the chief hurdles for broadband proliferation in Pakistan. Regulator, PTA and the government are trying hard to overcome these problems by lessening bandwidth rates and solving other problems.

Three companies — Multinet, Wateen, and Worldcall — are deploying fiber-optic networks throughout the country that should be helpful for broadband growth. In addition to existing SEA-ME-WE-3, two extra undersea cables have been deployed in Pakistan to secure international connectivity. Worldcall is introducing Wimax for wireless broadband.

Considering the expected reductions of bandwidth rates, elimination of other hurdles, and infrastructure development, it is expected that broadband services will be accessible widely and at affordable prices in the coming years.

On the other hand, a Canadian company. Infosat Telecommunications, recently invested in telecommunication sector of Pakistan.

Infosat, partnered with Pakistan’s Comstar ISA Ltd., is going to launch the first broadband satellite hub in the country.

It is hoped that the broadband satellite hub will also be able to provide Internet access to remote areas of the country.

©2006 OhmyNews